The subject matter of articles published in Archives of Scientific Psychology spans the entire discipline of psychology. Journal readers will find articles on subjects ranging from neuroscience to political psychology, and all topics in between. Articles will also describe research conducted using any of the methods used by researchers in psychology — experimental, descriptive, and research synthesis, quantitative and qualitative.

This is an "open access" journal, which means that a publication fee is typically assessed prior to publication for accepted manuscripts. However, the publication fee has been waived through 2014. Additionally, all authors of articles accepted for publication through 2014 will have lifetime waivers of any publication fees.

Articles are published in sections encompassing broad areas of psychological investigation. These are:

Abnormal, clinical, and counseling psychology

Applications of psychology

Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive psychology

Comparative psychology

Developmental and life span psychology

Educational and school psychology

Health and pediatric psychology

Methods, measurement, and assessment

Organizational psychology

Social and personality psychology

Articles published in Archives of Scientific Psychology have five characteristics that, together, make them unique:

The articles are free and open to the public; anyone with access to the Internet should have access to these research papers.

Authors have completed a questionnaire — based on APA's Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) or the Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS) — that provides a finely nuanced description of the study's rationale, method, results, and interpretation.

The authors have made available for use by others the data that underlie the analyses presented in the paper.

Because articles published in Archives of Scientific Psychology are available to the general public as well as scientists, readers find two versions of each article's

Abstract, one written in "plain English" and the other used for retrieval of the article from databases of scientific references.

Method section, one providing a brief, non-technical rendition of the study's participants, measures, procedures and analytic approach, and the other contained in the JARS Questionnaire.

The (a) article, (b) comments on the article (perhaps by scholars who took part in the peer review process), and (c) authors' response may be published at the same time. Additional comments on the article can be posted to a public discussion forum linked to the article, which will be monitored by the Editorial office.

Suzette M. Evans
Professor of Clinical Neuroscience and Research Scientist VI, Director of the Women's Research Center
Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute
Editor, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology

Isabel Gauthier
Professor of Psychology
Vanderbilt University
Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Art Graesser
Professor, Department of Psychology and Institute for Intelligent Systems
The University of Memphis
Past Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

Robert L. Greene
Professor of Psychology
Case Western Reserve University
Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Rick Hoyle
Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University
Editor, Self and Identity; Past Editor, Journal of Social Issues

Michael C. Roberts
Professor, Clinical Child Psychology Program
University of Kansas
Past Editor, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice

Eliot R. Smith
Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University
Editor, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition; Past Editor, Personality and Social Psychology Review

Stephen T. Wegener
Associate Professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Department of Health Policy and Management
The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Editor, Rehabilitation Psychology

Sheldon Zedeck
Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
Past Editor, Journal of Applied Psychology

Abstracting and indexing services providing coverage of the Archives of Scientific Psychology

PsycINFO

Instructions to Authors

Archives of Scientific Psychology is a new journal of APA. It is a response to recent changes in how social, behavioral, and cognitive scientists communicate with one another and with the public.

It is an "open methodology, collaborative data sharing, open access" journal. Among other things, this means that, for accepted manuscripts, authors/institutions normally pay a fee prior to publication. However, the publication fee has been waived through 2014. Additionally, all authors of articles accepted for publication through 2014 will have lifetime waivers of any publication fees.

In addition, this new journal responds to changes in what people expect to learn when they read a scientific research report.

The standards for publication in Archives are as high as those for any other APA journal. Therefore, only those manuscripts that are well-written and present research of the highest quality will be accepted for publication.

In addition, there are requirements for publication in Archives that go beyond those of other APA journals. These are meant to ensure the scientific validity of the studies published in Archives.

In particular, authors complete APA's Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) and, when appropriate, Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS) questionnaires that will be reviewed along with the manuscript. (See the "Method Questionnaires" heading.) Authors also agree to make their data available to other qualified researchers upon publication. Authors are required to make the data available at later stages of the review process, but will not be required to do so with the first submission. Copies of the full reports are available for JARS and MARS (PDF, 98KB).

Editors and reviewers have agreed to the same level of strict confidentiality with regard to the data as with the manuscript itself.

Because it is an open access journal, Archives authors submit two abstracts. One will be reviewed for its ability to communicate the study and its value to an educated public audience. The other will be reviewed for its suitability as a description for scientists and for purposes of document retrieval from reference databases.

Should a manuscript be accepted for publication, the action editor may provide reviewers an opportunity to prepare a comment based on their reviews that will be published simultaneously with the article and may be accompanied by an author reaction, assuming the author wishes to provide one. This is done at the discretion of the action editor.

Submission

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.

Our Archives of Scientific PsychologyAuthor Checklist (PDF, 45KB) summarizes items you should have ready when you begin submitting your manuscript. Submitting authors should be prepared to provide the following:

Affiliation and contact information for all authors

Disclosure of any conflicts of interest

Verification of agreement to share data

The data sharing agreement stipulates that the author will submit to an approved repository (one maintained by APA is an option) the data upon which the research reported in the manuscript is based.

There is no need to submit the data file itself with the first submission of the manuscript but authors should be prepared to submit their data when requested to do so by the Editor. Editors and authors are sworn to keep both the manuscript and data strictly confidential.

Open Access Fee Schedule

Open access journals are normally paid for via author fees assessed as part of the publication process, not by subscription fees to the journal. All such fees are waived for manuscripts submitted to Archives of Scientific Psychology through December 2015.

Manuscripts

Screening for Originality

Archives of Scientific Psychology is using a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares each submitted manuscript against a database of 25+ million scholarly publications, as well as content appearing on the open web.

This allows APA to check submissions for potential overlap with material previously published in scholarly journals. A similarity report will be generated by the system and provided to the Archives of Scientific Psychology editorial office for review immediately upon submission and payment of submission fees.

Anonymous Review

Authors decide whether they want the manuscript package to be evaluated with or without their identities known to reviewers. If anonymous review is desired, authors are responsible for preparing the manuscript in a fashion that does not reveal their identity. Reviewers are given the same option to reveal their identity to the authors.

Length

Manuscripts submitted to Archives of Scientific Psychology should contain no more than 6,500 words in the main text (excluding title page, abstracts, references, tables and figures, appendices). However, authors are encouraged to include supplemental files containing additional information about the study's background and results, and an expanded discussion.

Manuscripts reporting multiple studies can be submitted and can add 1,250 words of main text for each additional study up to a maximum length of 10,000 words of main text pages.

When a manuscript is submitted for review, the supplemental materials should be submitted (as one file or as separate files) along with the manuscript file. The supplemental files should be referred to as Supplemental File A, B, and so on at the appropriate point in the main text.

Abstracts

There should be two abstracts presented in the manuscript. These should appear separately on the two pages following the title page.

The first abstract should be written in plain English for the educated public; it describes the study and why its findings are important to understanding human thought, feeling, and behavior and/or to assisting with solutions to psychological or societal problems.

The second abstract is a scientific abstract (that conforms to APA Style) and will be used for retrieval of the article from databases of scientific references.

Method Section

The Method section in the text of the manuscript should present a brief, non-technical rendition of the study's participants, measures, procedures, and analytic approach. If published, the Method section will also contain a link to its accompanying JARS Description (see below).

Method Questionnaires

The Method Questionnaires are available for download below. They should be completed and submitted along with the manuscript upon first submission. They systematically describe the finer nuances of the study's rationale, method, results (including secondary analyses and nonsignificant results), and interpretation.

The JARS Questionnaires file contains several questionnaires, some of which may not be relevant to a particular submission.

The questionnaire titled JARS: ALL should be completed for all new primary data collections. It also contains a brief entry regarding the type of research design.

JARS: EXP should also be completed when the study or studies used experimental manipulation(s).

JARS: RCT should be completed if subjects were randomly assigned to experimental conditions.

JARS: QED should be completed if subjects were not randomly assigned to experimental conditions.

JARS: MISC should be completed if the research employed a non-experimental design (e.g., collection of questionnaire data using correlational, causal modeling, or hierarchical modeling analytic procedures).

Additional modules will be added to the JARS as they become available. These will cover other aspects of research design (e.g., longitudinal data collections, use of neuroimaging technologies) and types of research.

Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS)

Facilitated Discussion

Comments from the reviewers and others may appear along with accepted articles when they are published. Authors will be invited to provide a short reaction, if they so desire.

All comments and responses will be published at the same time as the article. Each comment and response will have a unique title and citation, for example, "A Second Look: Comment on [Author et al., 2012]." The article and reviewer comments will be linked.

When the article is published it will also contain a link to a public discussion forum on the target article.

Display Equations

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.

Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Computer Code

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In the Text of the Article
If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Tables

Use Word's Insert Table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

Permissions

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

Publication Policies

APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

Under the two Creative Commons License options, the author(s) retain copyright of their manuscript. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, CC-BY permits free third-party use, distribution, and reproduction of content in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited. CC-BY license is required by the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK (RCUK).

Ethical Principles

It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish "as original data, data that have been previously published" (Standard 8.13) and to withhold data from other competent professionals, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release (Standard 8.14).

APA expects authors to adhere to these standards and data sharing is a requirement for publication in the Archives of Scientific Psychology.

Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.

The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling the APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read "Ethical Principles," December 1992, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.